Whether to stop generating depends on the possible solution. If there are ever bad blocks, I can imagine an officially patched Bitcoin could be hard coded to exclude bad transactions contained in the block chain so that although the bad transactions would still be sitting in the chain, they would be ignored. I recommend people keep on generating if you were previously generating but be cautious about transactions until we hear back from Satoshi.

I'm afraid the community is just too big and distributed now to expect much in the way of voluntary quick action on anything, especially generation which I'm sure many have on automatic and largely unmoderated.

Can you easily hardcode a check for the bad block's hash at startup and orphan it and subsequent blocks if they're on the best-block chain?It's painful to have to re-download all or most of the chain to fix this...

How often do you get the chance to work on a potentially world-changing project?

Can you easily hardcode a check for the bad block's hash at startup and orphan it and subsequent blocks if they're on the best-block chain?It's painful to have to re-download all or most of the chain to fix this...

Or just a quick re-verification of all blocks. After all, it is 5x faster than it used t be.

Once you have an update, you could download knightmb's block chain. You'll want one that's old enough that it ends before block 74000 so the most recent security lockin will check it. Can someone find the link for that?

Once you have an update, you could download knightmb's block chain. You'll want one that's old enough that it ends before block 74000 so the most recent security lockin will check it. Can someone find the link for that?

Block verification after the patch but before everyone upgrades is going to be SLOW! It'll probably cause the next difficulty adjustment to decrease significantly. Of course everyone will probably have upgraded by the time the next adjustment rolls around, so we'll probably roll through it relatively quickly.

For now, recommended steps:1) Shut down.2) Download knightmb's blk files. (replace your blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat files)3) Upgrade.4) It should start out with less than 74000 blocks. Let it redownload the rest.

If you don't want to use knightmb's files, you could just delete your blk*.dat files, but it's going to be a lot of load on the network if everyone is downloading the whole block index at once.

How about explaining to us stupid newbies what we would do with the blockchain once we download it?

While Bitcoin is not running, you put it in your Bitcoin data directory. ~/.bitcoin on Linux. If you want to re-download the whole chain, you just delete the file from the data directory while Bitcoin is not running.

I'm going to be move my blk00x.dat files and blkindex.dat file out of by data directory and restart the client. Those are the correct files, right?

Edit: I'll also backup the whole directory, like I usually do before upgrades.

Will the bug fix include the 4-way SSE2 patch of 0.3.9 rc2? Thanks for letting me know that it is included, theymos. Please release another release candidate when you have a moment if it is not included.